Mike Millett and Trust-First Marketing
Trust-First Marketing is the discipline Mike Millett writes about on MarketingOB1: build the trust environment before you scale the reach.
Trust-First Marketing is the discipline Mike writes about on MarketingOB1. Its claim is about sequence: the conditions in which a customer can believe you are built before spend is scaled, not after it.
Reach applied to a brand nobody has a reason to trust buys attention and converts none of it. That is not a moral argument, it is an arithmetic one, and it is the most expensive mistake available to a business with a budget.
It is not Trust-Based Marketing
This distinction is worth being precise about, because the terms look interchangeable and are not.
Trust-Based Marketing
An established concept associated with Glen Urban of MIT Sloan, concerned with honesty and advocacy inside the purchase decision itself. It is somebody else's work, it is taught and cited, and it is not what this describes.
Trust-First Marketing
Concerned with the sequence of investment: what a business builds, and in what order, so that trust exists before reach is bought.
Mike discusses the older concept and does not claim it. He also does not claim to have coined the phrase Trust-First Marketing: prior uses exist. The objective is association with a specific modern definition, which is a different and more honest thing than claiming a string of words.
What building trust first actually means
Not a campaign and not a tone of voice. Reviews that accumulate, category authority that is genuinely useful to somebody who is not buying, a reputation that exists independently of any advertising, and answers that are the same wherever a person or a machine finds them.
It is slower than buying reach and it compounds, which is the whole trade.
Where the canonical material lives
The full treatment is on MarketingOB1, which holds this territory. This page establishes the association and links onward.